This month, March 2008, I celebrate my sixth year anniversary of my first professional photography job. And like most good stories with a happy ending, this story involves luck and numerous wonderful women who step in at the exact moment required.

After struggling for a couple of years pretending to be at best, an adequate photographer, but having the wisdom to keep my day job, I wanted to get more serious and thus started taking any non-profit (AKA non-paying) photography job to try to improve upon my fledgling portfolio. My sole hope was that someone would take me serious and pay me. One of those many non-paid photo jobs was to photograph Gamble Garden in Palo Alto, CA. They have an annual fund raiser, a Spring Tour, in which various home gardens are available for viewing. Back in 2002, a friend suggested that I should attend the San Francisco Flower & Garden show to prepare (read: improve) on my photography skills for the upcoming Spring Tour.

The Flower & Garden Show was love at first sight. For those who have not had the privilege to attend, about 25 garden creators have 5 days to build a magnificent garden, which is then showcased in theater lighting. My friend and I stayed Friday night until they kicked us out and returned on Sunday as well. Upon leaving Sunday night, I saw a banner proclaiming, “See you next year.” I remember pausing and then thinking, wouldn’t it be great to have that job of photographing the show. (The fact that no one had paid me a single cent for my photography work up to that point—all for very good reasons--went unspoken by me.)

About a month after the show, I was at Gamble Garden being “photo boy” to a group of friends. (“Oh, photo boy, take a picture of this.” That’s what you get when you are the only one with a camera.) At one garden venue, a woman approached me and we had an extended and spirited conversation. She was the Show Manager of the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show and she was looking for a new photographer! Her husband remembered me from the Show a month before. I left that serendipitous meeting excited but also filled with those dreaded thoughts: if only I had more experience, or a better camera, or even one paying client, or if I could even photograph worth a damn, I might stand a chance, but it is all much too early. Thus, it was quite a shock to me, at a later meeting, when the show manager said it all came down to one thing—she wanted to see a 16” x 20” print of a garden.

That particular summer I was working in Minneapolis and St. Cloud, MN in what was supposed to be a 2 week assignment that expanded to an almost 3 month assignment. In St. Cloud, they have two excellent/world-class gardens and so what better opportunity than for me to have an extended period to take one simple, yet elegant, photo? It all seemed so easy…

I bought a medium format camera (spending almost all the money I would have made if I did get the flower show) and shot almost every night. During my lunch hour, I would bring in several rolls of film to be developed at the local camera store. I would eagerly review the photos with high expectations and yet roll after roll, her simple request for one garden photo evaded me: the composition was wrong, the image was out of focus, that photo was too dark, that one was too light, and all were just too wrong. How could I not get one good photo in two excellent gardens? (I did have the presence of mind not to tell the film developer that I was trying to secure my first paying photography job for the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show! I feared he would forcefully take my camera away from me and suggest I keep my day job.)

(Continued in Part 2)